p51d007:Goes faster, goes LONGER than the Chevy volt, COSTS WAY LESS...Yep, can't allow that, the government will find a way to shut him down.

Doesn't go faster, nor longer, does cost less.

The government doesn't give a shiat about home made golf carts with a max range of 75 miles. No one does. Unless you can charge it in 5 minutes, or swap the battery pack easily, it's a cute project, and nothing more.

Ironically, the original engine was more economical once you take the overall production of energy into account. For example, this guy is using electricity generated offsite, shipped to his door on losy power lines and then fed through a transformer that turns at least 20% of it to heat. Then it's stored in batteries that lose power by the minute and forced through an electric motor that is probably underrated for the task, meaning it's turning a lot of the energy into heat as well. It was cheaper for the world power supply to keep the gas burning engine in the thing.

Yes. It's neat. It's also something that people do thousands of times a year around the country. Not worthy of a greenlight IMHO.

Yep, this is what's called an electric car conversion, there are a number of websites devoted to it, it's not something unique. They typically use lead-acid batteries, which means that you've got 1000 pounds of batteries in the car, which gives you a range of perhaps 50 miles. The battery weight is so high with lead acid batteries that you can't get much more of a range than that, since much of the energy stored in the batteries is being used to haul the batteries around.

I've heard of wood gassification before, but didn't realize that the process was fast enough that you could run a car on it.

These people have a big wood burning stove (more or less) in the back of a pickup truck, which is creating gas fuel that's being pumped into the engine of the car and burned. Thus, the car is actually running off wood fuel. On the downside, according to the articles I read, they go through maybe 1.5 pounds of wood per mile that the car drives. I'm guessing that most of them have a free source of wood. If you have to pay for wood, you're probably paying 10 cents a pound if you're in a rural area and buy large amounts of it. 15 cents per mile is as expensive or more expensive than what you'd typically be paying to run a car with gas.

theorellior:Kahabut: Ironically, the original engine was more economical once you take the overall production of energy into account.

Yeah, that gas magically appeared in the gas tank, there wasn't a global system of mining, refining, piping, shipping and trucking that fuel to his local gas station.

I am pretty sure that in well to wheel studies the production of and transportation of fossil fuels is quite efficient. The losses are mainly in the inefficiency of the IC engine and transmission. OTOH similar studies show that inefficiency of electric cars are due to the transmission of AC power, which is quite lossy, and recharging the batteries. In terms of total energy efficiency electric cars are usually better than gas and about equal to diesel. So I am not so sure about Kahabut's statement that the original Beattle engine was more efficient than an electric conversion but that is certainly possible (it was pretty light weight and under powered). One thing I am sure of is the original engine spewed a lot of polluntants.

100 btu of gasoline (ignoring as theorellior states, the vast amounts of energy used to pump, refine and transport that gasoline in the first place)-83% energy loss from internal combusion = 17 btu of force-20% energy loss from standard combusion drivetrain = 14 btu of movement.

So even when giving the internal combusion car a huge benefit by not counting the losses invoved with creating gasoline, it's still 1/3rd as efficienct at one of the least methods of generating electricity. For folks like me, who have rooftop solar power that feeds directly into a DC charging bank for my EV there's very little energy lost.

Plus there's the little fact that ~100 btu of energy from electricity is about 1/5th the cost of 100 btu of gasoline.

I've heard of wood gassification before, but didn't realize that the process was fast enough that you could run a car on it.

These people have a big wood burning stove (more or less) in the back of a pickup truck, which is creating gas fuel that's being pumped into the engine of the car and burned. Thus, the car is actually running off wood fuel. On the downside, according to the articles I read, they go through maybe 1.5 pounds of wood per mile that the car drives. I'm guessing that most of them have a free source of wood. If you have to pay for wood, you're probably paying 10 cents a pound if you're in a rural area and buy large amounts of it. 15 cents per mile is as expensive or more expensive than what you'd typically be paying to run a car with gas.

There is a lot of scrap wood out there. However you have to spend your time collecting it. I have a friend who heats his house and water with a wood gasification furnace. He gets his wood for free. Furnace wasn't cheap though.

100 btu of gasoline (ignoring as theorellior states, the vast amounts of energy used to pump, refine and transport that gasoline in the first place)-83% energy loss from internal combusion = 17 btu of force-20% energy loss from standard combusion drivetrain = 14 btu of movement.

So even when giving the internal combusion car a huge benefit by not counting the losses invoved with creating gasoline, it's still 1/3rd as efficienct at one of the least methods of generating electricity. For folks like me, who have rooftop solar power that feeds directly into a DC charging bank for my EV there's very little energy lost.

Plus there's the little fact that ~100 btu of energy from electricity is about 1/5th the cost of 100 btu of gasoline.

Where did you get your numbers from? How many square feet of solar do you need to charge your electric vehicle and for how long.

something often not considered in these situations is that the infrastructure for delivery of electricity to users is in place, and the power generation is largely centralized, so if a more efficient and/or cleaner power production method comes a long, than a relatively short list of power plants need to be replaced to completely change over the system. On the other hand, the infrastructure for gas powered vehicles which is also already in place is heavily dependent on how power is generated. For instance, if there was a switch to hydrogen from gasoline, all the cars would need to have new power plants, and all the filling stations would need to be converted to handle hydrogen rather than gasoline then when something better comes along, the entire infrastructure would need to be reworked again. On the other hand if you're using electric for automobiles, and they want to replace coal with solar or wind, than you replace the coal plant with a wind farm. Yes, the initial switch to electric power plants for individual automobiles needs to happen, but it happens once. Frankly though, I think there needs to be a dramatic increase in the charge time for batteries, and a somewhat substantial increase in range for electric cars to happen before this makes sense.

rwfan:Where did you get your numbers from? How many square feet of solar do you need to charge your electric vehicle and for how long.

I've got solar power up the yin-yang these days, powering almost every aspect of my life, so it's a little hard to breakdown the square footage required purely for my car. I can give it a try through!

My home's rooftop, 3.8KW covers 100% my heating and home energy needs, it also provides all the energy required for my 25 mile drive to work:My work's rooftop - 13.6 KW (not including 3.6kw awning array): Covers about 20% of the total annual energy needs of the office & all of my car charging at work.The community array the office bought into (5% ownership), about 1.2KW: Covers an additional 5% of the office's energy use.The rooftop at the vacation house3.8KW: Provides 3x's the energy of the home's electricity need (it does have nat gas heat and water though).The community array & small wind tied to the vacation house (2% ownership, about 2KW): Powers any of my trips to and from the vacation house.Additional small wind added at the community power array. Annual output is currently unknown, as it's quite new.We're thinking of buying into another 3.6KW of a new city community solar array at the office in the coming weeks. So to figure out where I get all of my car's energy needs and exactly the square footage isn't exactly a simple question.

Most simply is that I drive 50 miles a day and 250 miles a week - my driving efficiency is 4 miles per kwh; meaning I use 62.5 kWh of energy a month to power my car. Between the share of the energy sources above, they generate an average of 80 kWh a day . . . or 2,480 kWh a month. I still need to roughly triple our renewable production at the office to get close ot meeting 100% of the energy needs of our servers and 30 employees.

Considering I'm doing this in cloudy Seattle - it would be a lot more simple to pull off in LA, Vegas, Dallas, or Orlando - where there's ~2x-3x's the amount of sunlight.

MrSteve007:rwfan: Where did you get your numbers from? How many square feet of solar do you need to charge your electric vehicle and for how long.

I've got solar power up the yin-yang these days, powering almost every aspect of my life, so it's a little hard to breakdown the square footage required purely for my car. I can give it a try through!

My home's rooftop, 3.8KW covers 100% my heating and home energy needs, it also provides all the energy required for my 25 mile drive to work:[fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net image 719x539]My work's rooftop - 13.6 KW (not including 3.6kw awning array): Covers about 20% of the total annual energy needs of the office & all of my car charging at work.[sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net image 720x481]The community array the office bought into (5% ownership), about 1.2KW: Covers an additional 5% of the office's energy use.[www.djc.com image 850x566]The rooftop at the vacation house3.8KW: Provides 3x's the energy of the home's electricity need (it does have nat gas heat and water though).[fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net image 719x539]The community array & small wind tied to the vacation house (2% ownership, about 2KW): Powers any of my trips to and from the vacation house.[wacleantech.org image 850x637]Additional small wind added at the community power array. Annual output is currently unknown, as it's quite new.[bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com image 850x574]We're thinking of buying into another 3.6KW of a new city community solar array at the office in the coming weeks. So to figure out where I get all of my car's energy needs and exactly the square footage isn't exactly a simple question.

Most simply is that I drive 50 miles a day and 250 miles a week - my driving efficiency is 4 miles per kwh; meaning I use 62.5 kWh of energy a month to power my car. Between the share of the energy sources above, they generate an average of 80 kWh a day . . . or 2,480 kWh a month. I still need to roughly triple our renewable production at the office ...

I have always said it's awesome when you show up to a thread. So are you the only one charging an ev at work? It doesn't seem like there is a wide scale adoption of charging ev's with renewable energy. Do you have an estimate or guess even what the costs are of charging your ev with solar? I agree that the roofs of the sunny part of the country should be covered with solar.

I've heard of wood gassification before, but didn't realize that the process was fast enough that you could run a car on it.

These people have a big wood burning stove (more or less) in the back of a pickup truck, which is creating gas fuel that's being pumped into the engine of the car and burned. Thus, the car is actually running off wood fuel. On the downside, according to the articles I read, they go through maybe 1.5 pounds of wood per mile that the car drives. I'm guessing that most of them have a free source of wood. If you have to pay for wood, you're probably paying 10 cents a pound if you're in a rural area and buy large amounts of it. 15 cents per mile is as expensive or more expensive than what you'd typically be paying to run a car with gas.

It was also done in Europe during WWII, when people in occupied countries didn't have much chance of obtaining gasoline.

rwfan:I have always said it's awesome when you show up to a thread. So are you the only one charging an ev at work? It doesn't seem like there is a wide scale adoption of charging ev's with renewable energy. Do you have an estimate or guess even what the costs are of charging your ev with solar? I agree that the roofs of the sunny part of the country should be covered with solar.

We've got two other people who are looking to buy an EV - but since our only "chargepoint" in the parking lot is simply a 110v outlet at the base of our one parking lot light, there isn't much juice to go around. We're currently getting bids to put in two dedicated 220v charge bollards in the lot, but with the cost being estimated at about $15k, they're balking a bit. The install involves some 200 feet of trenching + concrete demo and reconstruction of pathways, so that's why it's pretty steep.

As for the question of cost to charge with solar, that's a tough one, as it comes down largely to how you want to account for it. My simple method comes down to saying that I spent $25,000 improving my house with PV, and that improvement will pay itself off 6.5 years from the day I installed it (I have 5.4 years left). After that point, all of the energy at home and for my driving is free for the next few decades.

Between the $7,500 from the feds this year as a tax credit, the reduction in my utility (and gasoline bills) along with my annual production check, I'll do just fine. In fact, I got my first production notice in the mail just this week!

it's closer to 1lb/mile, however...think about that for a second. you drive 200 miles a day...you need about 200 lb of wood, right? So what does 200 lbs of wood look like?

well:

This is a cord....it weights about 2500 (pine)This would last around 12 days...lets call it 2 weeksso you would only need around 25 of these per year.If you live in an area that has lots of wood and trees....it is nothing.

This is the most Ironic story I've seen all day, talk about living in a fantasy world!!!

"John Watson, a 73-year-old Caroline County farmer who pretty much hand-raises Angus cattle and believes everyone needs to be driving an electric car or future generations won't have much of an environment."

Really??? I wonder if he's aware of the fact that factory farming causes more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions-not just carbon dioxide (CO2), but also methane and nitrous oxide, than all the trucks, automobiles, trains, and boats in the world combined!

Lusebagage:This is the most Ironic story I've seen all day, talk about living in a fantasy world!!!

"John Watson, a 73-year-old Caroline County farmer who pretty much hand-raises Angus cattle and believes everyone needs to be driving an electric car or future generations won't have much of an environment."

Really??? I wonder if he's aware of the fact that factory farming causes more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions-not just carbon dioxide (CO2), but also methane and nitrous oxide, than all the trucks, automobiles, trains, and boats in the world combined!

Yes. It's neat. It's also something that people do thousands of times a year around the country. Not worthy of a greenlight IMHO.

Yep, this is what's called an electric car conversion, there are a number of websites devoted to it, it's not something unique. They typically use lead-acid batteries, which means that you've got 1000 pounds of batteries in the car, which gives you a range of perhaps 50 miles. The battery weight is so high with lead acid batteries that you can't get much more of a range than that, since much of the energy stored in the batteries is being used to haul the batteries around.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/electric-car7.htm

No one uses lead anymore. Four years ago some still did but today not one in twenty conversions is lead.

theorellior:Kahabut: Ironically, the original engine was more economical once you take the overall production of energy into account.

Yeah, that gas magically appeared in the gas tank, there wasn't a global system of mining, refining, piping, shipping and trucking that fuel to his local gas station.

You have to be a special kind of stupid. Do they have a name for it yet?

Replace "gas" with "electricity". What changed? The global infrastructure? The environmental devastation? The multiple forms of transmission? Nope, all of that is still there, so... did you have a point or do you just enjoy being mocked?

I'm sure he pets them to sleep, and gives them all cute names before he sends them off to get their throats slit! Yes, "hand raising" (whatever that even means) is still factory farming. "Humane" or "Organic" meat is simply a band aid for bleeding conscience. Its not humane to steal a creatures purpose, its simply another form of violence. lets use it in a sentence, shall we. "I hand raised this slave calf, I even hand raped its mother, then I stole that babies milk with my own two hands so I could sell it, tomorrow I'm going to kill it, by hand!"

I am so certain that the Fark headline is misleading that I have not bothered to click through to the article, and nor have I bothered to read any of the 48 comments. I am content that there would be no merit in doing so.

MrSteve007:rwfan: Where did you get your numbers from? How many square feet of solar do you need to charge your electric vehicle and for how long.

I've got solar power up the yin-yang these days, powering almost every aspect of my life, so it's a little hard to breakdown the square footage required purely for my car. I can give it a try through!

My home's rooftop, 3.8KW covers 100% my heating and home energy needs, it also provides all the energy required for my 25 mile drive to work:[fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net image 719x539]My work's rooftop - 13.6 KW (not including 3.6kw awning array): Covers about 20% of the total annual energy needs of the office & all of my car charging at work.[sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net image 720x481]The community array the office bought into (5% ownership), about 1.2KW: Covers an additional 5% of the office's energy use.[www.djc.com image 850x566]The rooftop at the vacation house3.8KW: Provides 3x's the energy of the home's electricity need (it does have nat gas heat and water though).[fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net image 719x539]The community array & small wind tied to the vacation house (2% ownership, about 2KW): Powers any of my trips to and from the vacation house.[wacleantech.org image 850x637]Additional small wind added at the community power array. Annual output is currently unknown, as it's quite new.[bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com image 850x574]We're thinking of buying into another 3.6KW of a new city community solar array at the office in the coming weeks. So to figure out where I get all of my car's energy needs and exactly the square footage isn't exactly a simple question.

Most simply is that I drive 50 miles a day and 250 miles a week - my driving efficiency is 4 miles per kwh; meaning I use 62.5 kWh of energy a month to power my car. Between the share of the energy sources above, they generate an average of 80 kWh a day . . . or 2,480 kWh a month. I still need to roughly triple our renewable production at the office ...

Much respect. I didn't know you were in Seattle. That was going to be my question when it came to the cloud coverage...I'm in Houston, and am considering buying a beach house in Galveston, and throwing some panels up on the beach house, to reduce my yearly light bill off that home when we aren't there.